Carlos Velasquez hauls away brush being cut by coworker Jose D. Rodriquez along the road leading to the Palomar Observatory.
— Charlie Neuman

PALOMAR MOUNTAIN  There are parts of Palomar Mountain that haven’t burned in recorded history.

The eastern and northern slopes, as well as at the top where most people live, are filled with cedar, white fir, oak and pine trees. The brush beneath the trees is overgrown.

It’s a highly combustible situation that could have dire consequences not just for the 325 people who live on the mountain but for greater North County: If Santa Ana winds are blowing and a fire starts to the east, the blaze could head all the way to the coast. That threat is on residents’ minds as the region enters the traditional prime season for wildfires.

A few years ago, a task force identified Palomar Mountain as the area in the county most at risk of wildfire devastation. Since then, various agencies have launched intense brush-clearing efforts.

“Palomar Mountain is out of whack,” said Cleveland National Forest Palomar District Division Chief Rick Marinelli. “There’s too much fuel on the ground and fire has been excluded up there for a hundred years.”

In recent days, for example, there were two lighting strikes on the mountain that started small fires. They were extinguished quickly.

In days long ago, those strikes would have led to smoldering blazes that a week later, when winds picked up, might have become full-blown forest fires that would burn for miles. That’s nature’s method of keeping the ground relatively clear of heavy fuels.

The time has passed when wildfires can be allowed to burn freely because of what fire experts refer to as the “wildland-urban interface,” which means people have increasingly cleared forest land to build houses. Such development compels firefighters to suppress blazes so they don’t reach the point where they can kill people and destroy property.

Alternatives expensive

So the alternative is to thin out forests using expensive and time-consuming measures. Palomar Mountain is large and budgets, especially these days, are small. But residents said the preventive approach is worth it, given what happened in 2007.

That October, the entire mountain came close to burning up.

The Poomacha Fire, which began two days after other blazes in the county had scorched terrain to the south, roared up the southern slopes of Palomar and destroyed about 20 houses on the mountain.

But the winds weren’t blowing quite as strong and by good fortune, born out of years of preparedness, most of the community was saved.

“There was every chance in the world that whole mountain could have gone up in that fire,” said Carlton Joseph, fire chief of the Cleveland National Forest who also was the unified incident commander for the Poomacha Fire. “It was a near miss.”

What saved the mountain was a combination of preventive measures taken over the years, including back burns by firefighters, and the fact that there were lots of firefighters in the area who had been responding from across the state to the other fires in the county. Those out-of-town crews were redirected to battle the Poomacha Fire.